Aurel Kolnai Íngrid Vendrell Ferran PENULTIMATE DRAFT Published in: Landweer, Hilge, and Szanto, Thomas (eds.): The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Emotion, Routledge, 2020 Aurel Kolnai (1900–1973) is best known for his political and moral writings, but he also chiefly contributed to the phenomenology of the emotions. In a series of papers devoted to hostile and aversive emotions and, in particular, to disgust, haughty pride, fear, and hatred (Kolnai 1929, 1931, 1935 and 1998) Kolnai presents his most comprehensive views on the affective life and its ethical significance. Scattered discussions on the emotions can also be found in an early paper written on Scheler and under the influence of psychoanalysis (1925), in his dissertation Der ethische Wert und die Wirklichkeit (Ethical Value and Reality) (1927), which is his first phenomenological writing, and in later papers “On the Concept of the Interesting” (1964) and “The Concept of Hierarchy” (1971). This chapter is divided into four sections. The first reconstructs Kolnai’s general approach to the emotions as embedded within the larger context of early phenomenology. Sections 2–4 present Kolnai’s analyses of hostile emotions by focusing on disgust, haughty pride, and hatred. 1. Kolnai’s General Approach to the Emotions “Max Schelers Kritik und Würdigung der Freudschen Libidolehre” (Max Scheler’s Criticism and Praise of Freud’s Doctrine of the Libido) (1925), published in Imago, is the first writing in which Kolnai directly approaches the topic of the emotions. The text was written during a period in which Kolnai embraced psychoanalysis (he was trained in this movement by Ferenczi and Rank). His aim here is to defend Freud’s theory of the libido against Scheler’s criticisms in The Nature of Sympathy. Yet, anticipating his imminent turn to phenomenology, Kolnai ends by praising the phenomenological concept of the mind, as well as its methodology and ethics. Indeed, he even proposes to use phenomenology for a better understanding of psychoanalytical issues around normality and pathology, psychic development, repression, and sublimation. Like Scheler, Kolnai rejects in this early writing a simplistic interpretation of the libido, according to which there is a single form of psychic energy able to generate the multifarious manifestations of our mind. Both agree that such a simplistic interpretation would lead to a 1 flattening of our psychic lives. For instance, applied to the case of the emotions, it would imply that all the different forms of love have their origins in the sphere of the libido and are derived from sexual love and can be explained as such. The simplistic interpretation would also suggest that it is impossible to distinguish between levels of emotional depth according to the hierarchy of the values toward which they are directed (1925, 143). That is, if all emotions were derived from the same kind of psychic energy, then they would be blind to different value-complexes and would intend the same type of value. These points of agreement with Scheler are mentioned in this text only en passant, but they are crucial in light of Kolnai’s later contributions to the phenomenology of the emotions (see below and section 4). Unlike Scheler, however, Kolnai claims that the Freudian concept of the libido already entails the possibility of making such differentiations in the field of the emotions. Furthermore, still against Scheler, he also considers the possibility that some emotions might be derived from others, observing that our emotions toward one and the same object might change, and that in this change one emotion is the source of the other. According to Kolnai’s example, the love we experience for someone might transform unnoticed into hatred (or indifference). When this happens, the hatred conserves all the passion and energy of the previous emotion of love from which it emerged and which has now disappeared (1925, 143–144). Furthermore, he takes the possibility of mixed emotions for granted. In fact, he considers each transformation of an emotion into another to be a case of mixed feeling, claiming that though nobody experiences green as the mixture of blue and yellow, green can emerge from the combination of both. These topics will reappear in his analyses of the aversive emotions, and one can assume here that it is the influence of psychoanalysis that explains Kolnai’s lifelong predilection for topics concerning negative, ambivalent, and mixed emotions. Apart from this early writing at the intersection between psychoanalysis and phenomenology, throughout the rest of his philosophical work on the emotions, Kolnai embraces the views of the early phenomenologists. This output comprises his three essays on the hostile attitudes: “Der Ekel” (On Disgust) (1929), “Der Hochmut” (Haughty Pride) (1931), and “Versuch über den Hass” (Essay on Hatred) (1935), as well as the later paper “The Standard Modes of Aversion: Fear, Disgust and Hatred” (1998) written during the ’70s at the request of David Wiggins as a summary of his key claims about phenomenology of the aversion and posthumously published in Mind.1 In all these texts, Kolnai employs exemplarily the phenomenological method (and, in particular, the eidetic reduction), distinguishing the analyzed phenomena from cognate ones, identifying and describing their essential traits, and elaborating taxonomies. In his analyses of the hostile attitudes, Kolnai also endorses a specific 2 view of the emotions according to which they are intentional phenomena based on cognitions, which are capable of disclosing the realm of values to us. In embracing this view, Kolnai echoes the general idea of emotions as intentional phenomena put forward by Brentano’s followers within early phenomenology and the Graz School: namely Scheler, Pfänder, and Meinong.2 However, in his text on the aversive emotions, Kolnai only explicitly refers to such a view on one occasion. More concretely, in his later text “The Standard Modes of Aversion”, he refers to the emotions in terms of “emotive responses”, a concept that he describes as follows: “[emotive responses are] something closely germane I think to Meinong’s emotionale Präsentation, meaning thereby acts or attitudes or conative states of consciousness which on the one hand are clearly governed by an intentional object, and on the other hand express something like a passion aroused in the self, an impact exercised upon it down to its somatic sounding- board; in other words intention (Gegenständlichkeit) as linked essentially, though not in a uniform or unequivocal or causally necessary fashion, to condition (Zuständlichkeit)” (2004b, 94). There are two features of the emotions mentioned in this passage that I will take as a point of departure to reconstruct Kolnai’s more general view using the references, observations, and comments scattered among his other works. Kolnai characterizes emotions as having an intentional and an experiential moment, which he refers to as “intention” and “condition” respectively. Regarding the moment of intentionality, Kolnai’s view might be characterized by way of the following three aspects. (1) First, he endorses a “cognitive model” according to which emotions require cognitive bases in order to occur. More concretely, perceptions, thoughts, and beliefs present us the objects toward which the emotions are directed. This view can be directly derived from Kolnai’s examples: To feel fear requires a perception or a thought (2004a, 36); to feel disgust toward an insect requires a perception of it; to feel contempt requires a belief in another’s inferiority (2004a, 82) (for similar views on the bases of the emotions, see, for instance, Meinong 1968, 35). (2) Yet, Kolnai does not conceptualize the intentionality of the emotions in terms of the intentionality of these other states on which the emotions are based, but rather, like many of Brentano’s followers, he understands such intentionality of the emotions as a sui generis form of reference toward their objects (illustrative of this view is Scheler 1973, 256). In other words, the fact that emotions require cognitive bases does not imply that emotional experience might be reduced to them, nor does it suggest that emotions’ intentionality is derived from their cognitive bases. 3 (3) To be precise, this original emotive intentionality consists in disclosing values. That is to say, values can only be grasped or presented by our emotions. Emotions are unique not only insofar as they are directed toward an object, but also insofar as they present this object to us as having a certain quality. Kolnai defends this position already in his dissertation, but it also appears in his text on disgust, in which he attributes to this emotion a cognitive and ethical function (Kolnai 2002, 67; 2004a, 81). In this regard, Kolnai advocates a “perceptual model” of the emotions (for a similar model, see Meinong 1968, 117; for a different idea of the relation between emotions and values within early phenomenology, see Scheler 1973, 256). These three claims should be interpreted within the boundaries of value realism. Value realism is a term used to encompass a wide range of positions, which claim that values are objective. Such value realism was widely accepted among early phenomenologists. In this view, rather than constituting a projection of my emotional state onto the world, my disgust reveals a certain quality of the object toward which it is directed. Kolnai’s commitment to value realism is clear not only in his dissertation on the ethical values and in his texts on the hostile emotions, but also in later texts such as in “On the Concept of the Interesting” (1964). Here he claims that while people are interested in different things, the concept of “interesting” cannot be reduced to a mere sense of being interested in something. In contrast, Kolnai characterizes the interesting as that which evokes interest without appealing to one’s interests (1968, 167–169).